The NY Times continues on its quest to obliterate knowledge, having started with doing profiles of ordinary Trumpians, now profiling those shattered by Mango Mussolini’s election. Perhaps the Times is redefining the Nixonian ‘silent majority’ now that we’re in the early part of Biglygate. Even after the Middle Ages, it’s about indulgence. OTOH he’s making artworks and doing land reclamation, so there’s that bliss.
It’s an easy vacation for a former West Coast tech exec to buy 45 acres in Ohio and not even think about voting. More interesting is how he’s gotten his social network to be complicit in his information isolation. The contrast to this guy could be with Dave Chappelle’s move back to Ohio.
Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Erik Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.
He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.
“It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”
It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.
He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.
“I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio. “But it’s only so diverting.”
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I recently spent two days visiting his farm on the condition that I not bring news from the outside world. As the sun set over his porch, turning the rolling hills pink then purple then blue, he held forth, jumping from English architecture to the local pigs’ eating habits to his mother’s favorite basketball team to the philosophy of Kant. He can go days without seeing another soul.
This life is still fairly new. Just a few years ago, he was a corporate executive at Nike (senior director of global digital commerce was his official, unwieldy title) working with teams of engineers to streamline the online shopping experience. Before that, he had worked digital jobs at Walmart and Disney.
“I worked 12-, 14-hour days,” he said. “The calendar completely booked.”
But three years ago, he decided he had saved enough money to move to a farm, make elliptical sculptures — and, eventually, opt out of the national conversation entirely.
I admire the possibility but also appreciate the hard work trying to manage rural life, however enabled. The reactions on Twitter are illuminating in terms of envy, repulsion, and condescension. For the rest of us we’ve resisted turning into dust, so far. Me, I’m going to try journaling more seriously or working on a digital platform that allows that in a coded form.